The assessment of blood flow in living tissue provides important information for diagnostics, treatment and/or management of pathological conditions. For example, the assessment of cutaneous (skin) microcirculations may provide important information for pathological conditions in dermatology, such as skin cancer, port wine stain treatment, diabetes, and plastic surgery. Similarly, assessment of the ocular perfusion within the retina and choroid of the human eye is important in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of a number of pathological conditions in ophthalmology, such as age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. Accordingly, clinical and technical tools that can noninvasively image three dimensional (3D) micro-blood vessel networks in vivo are in demand.
Several techniques have been developed to meet this need. However, current techniques suffer from various shortcomings which make them unsuitable for in vivo imaging in humans, such as low sensitivity to blood flow, insufficient resolution to provide useful depth information, and/or a long data acquisition time.